Warning: This article contains spoilers from Squid Game: The Challenge!
The producers of Squid Game: The Challenge revealed some pretty eye-opening secrets about the Glass Bridge game. A spin-off of the hugely popular Korean drama Squid Game, The Challenge brings together hundreds of real people who are competing against each other for a huge sum of money: $4.56 million, to be exact. In the Squid Game: The Challenge episodes that have been released so far on Netflix, viewers have gotten the chance to see the contestants play some iconic games from the scripted series, including Red Light, Green Light; Marbles; and Glass Bridge.
Now that the second batch of Squid Game: The Challenge season 1 episodes have been released, the producers are opening up about all the work that went into pulling off this reality show. In an interview with EW, John Hay and Stephen Lambert exposed some pretty shocking secrets about the Glass Bridge challenge, including that stunt people were brought in to replace the contestants as they fell through the glass. This was done in order to keep the players as safe as possible during filming. “There was a large airbag underneath, but that also needs to be done by professionals,” John explained.
Squid Game Producers Reveal What Surprised Them About Glass Bridge
Before Squid Game: The Challenge is accused once more of being a fake reality show, John emphasized that “everything else” that is shown during Glass Bridge is “real.” The patterns of the glass are determined beforehand, and the players’ reactions when they step on a wrong door “are all real.” The part of the challenge viewers don’t get to see is when “at the last minute, we swapped them out, and a stunt person did the fall.” Safety precautions continue to be in place when the stunt people do their jobs.
Interestingly, this break from reality didn’t negatively affect “the spell of the game” because the contestants are so close to winning that “their elimination really landed with an impact.” While these secrets about the stunt doubles are very shocking, the producers were actually surprised by a different element of the game. During that same Glass Bridge challenge, the strategy that the players employed was quite “clever,” according to Stephen. “They decided as a group to come up with this system where they would only each have to take a 50/50 chance.” He added that he and his fellow producers didn’t anticipate this move but admitted that the strategy “actually made it much fairer.“
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At the end of the day, Squid Game: The Challenge is a competition in which everyone plays against each other. But like with all of these reality competition shows, it’s natural for cooperation and teamwork to develop and for alliances to flourish. That aside, Squid Game: The Challenge has been criticized over allegedly inhumane filming conditions and claims that some of the games are rigged. It’s possible that the producers purposefully came forward to reveal that stunt people were used during Glass Bridge so that they wouldn’t receive even more backlash. Maybe transparency is the key, after all.
Squid Game: The Challenge streams Wednesdays on Netflix.
Sources: EW, Squid Game/Instagram
